Skip to main content

MAHA beats MAGA


The coalition that put Donald Trump into office twice is coming unravelled. That judgment is of the jigsaw-perceiving sort.  One of its pieces is the recent Republican Party primary in Iowa. 

https://www.wsaw.com/video/2026/06/03/lahn-wins-iowa-gop-governor-race-turek-takes-democratic-senate-primary/  

"Make America Healthy Again," a loose grouping itself, of people who read Ivan Ilych and those who just want to be able to drink unprocessed (raw) milk without governmental interference, of people who are sure vaccines cause autism and those who believe pesticides are destroying the food, from the granola eaters on the left to the granola eaters on the right including some who have made that transition personally -- MAHA ending up (as that acronym suggests) more-or-less aligned with MAGA during the last presidential election campaign. This year, in the mid-terms, that alignment has come apart. 

In the Iowa Republican primary for Governor, MAHA backed Zack Lahn, whereas MAGA, represented by President Donald Trump's specific endorsement, backed Representative Randy Feenstra. Lahn won, by embracing water and food quality issues and keying in on Iowa's cancer rate. In the most recently available data, Iowa ranked number three among the states in terms of the number of cancer patients per 100K residents. Only Kentucky and West Virginia scored higher, according to World Population Review. Kentucky and WV are both states long associated with coal mining, so coming in third TO THEM may help make Lahn's point. 

At any rate, in November we will see whether the MAHA candidate can patch things up with Feenstra and his supporters, and whether that allows him to beat his Democratic opponent, Rob Sand, who ran unopposed in his own primary.  


Labels:

Comments

  1. HenryJune 11, 2026 at 12:33 PM

    I've read Tolstoy's story, "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," but I don't get your reference to it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...
23 comments
Read more

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...
10 comments
Read more

A Quote from Parfit

Recently  I wrote a little about ethicist Derek Parfit. I've been doing further research on him since, and will now describe his Big Picture as I've come to understand it. Parfit believes that the western world only started taking ethical philosophy seriously (as a domain separate from theology) around the time Nietzsche declared that God was dead. There are only three possibilities, in terms of the God/morality issue: 1) You believe that God exists and that His commands define morality 2) You deny that God exists and, like Nietzsche, infer from this that in the absence of commands there is no right or wrong, or 3) You deny that God exists yet persist in believing and attempting to discern right and wrong. From a certain point of view there could be a fourth category, for people who believe that God exists but that His existence is irrelevant to morality, He doesn't issue commands at all, etc.  Still, from DP's perspective that sort of God ...
1 comment
Read more